|
Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of
nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly
split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in
1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United
Kingdom.
The achievement is also credited to English scientist John
Douglas Cockroft and Ireland's Ernest Walton, researchers in
1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford. It is not
attributed to Americans.
Trump’s account of U.S. greatness in one of Tuesday’s
inauguration addresses included a claim that Americans “crossed
deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild
West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted
millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom,
launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human
knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
New Zealand politician Nick Smith, the mayor of Nelson, where
Rutherford was born and educated, said he was “a bit surprised”
by the claim.
“Rutherford’s ground breaking research on radio communication,
radioactivity, the structure of the atom and ultra sound
technology were done at Cambridge and Manchester Universities in
the UK and McGill University in Montreal Canada,” Smith wrote on
Facebook.
Smith said he would invite the next U.S. ambassador to New
Zealand to visit Rutherford’s birthplace memorial “so we can
keep the historic record on who split the atom first accurate.”
A website for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of History
and Heritage Resources credits Cockroft and Walton with the
milestone, although it describes Rutherford's earlier
achievements in mapping the structure of the atom, postulating a
central nucleus and identifying the proton.
Trump's remarks provoked a flurry of online posts by New
Zealanders about Rutherford, whose work is studied by New
Zealand schoolchildren and whose name appears on buildings,
streets and institutions. His portrait features on the
100-dollar banknote.
“Okay, I’ve gotta call time. Trump just claimed America split
the atom,” Ben Uffindell, editor of the satirical New Zealand
news website The Civilian, wrote on X. “That’s THE ONE THING WE
DID.”
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights
reserved |
|
